But that does not mask the fact that some supporters need to take a long, hard look at themselves over their attitude to opposition players.

This isn’t just about Spurs fans - although it was they who were chucking the coins at Walcott at the Emirates on Saturday.

This is about a culture where some supporters scream for instant and disproportionate penalties to be visited on a player if he looks at them the wrong way.

This is about a culture where we too often seem to take a perverse pleasure in baiting a player and then demanding retribution if he responds.

This is about demanding a player behave like an angel while we dance and spit like devils.

Step out of line, like Jack Wilshere did when a few Manchester City fans were baiting him about his children and you get a two-game ban.

This is the other side of the celebrity lifestyle, where earning stacks of money is suddenly supposed to make you fair game for the worst kind of abuse.

And where you must respond with the dead soul of an automaton unless you wish the wrath of the self-righteous coin-thrower to be visited upon you.

(Image: Twitter)

What has happened to us as supporters that frothing outrage has replaced laughter as the normal response to light repartee from a player?

Some Spurs fans took particular pleasure in the news of how bad Walcott’s injury was when it emerged. It was karma, they said.

What? Karma is making a light-hearted gesture and then missing six months with a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament?

It is another symptom of the distance that has grown between players and fans. A kind of hostility rooted in jealousy is never far below the surface.

It is there in the speed in which some fans can turn on the players they claim to support.

I have no problem with Spurs fans chanting about Walcott - or Arsenal supporters singing about Samir Nasri, say. It’s part of the game. It’s part of the tribalism that can make watching English football so exciting.

But if you give it out, you’ve got to take it. It’s as simple as that.

Ways of behaviour in cricket are veering towards football too much for the liking of many. But at least in cricket, fans and players can still engage in exchanges on the boundary without moral indignation taking hold.

I sat on the hill for a couple of hours every afternoon at the third Ashes Test match at the WACA in Perth last month.

David Warner, Stuart Broad, Mitchell Johnson and Kevin Pietersen were among those who copped plenty of flak and gave some back.

No one went running to the police. No one started spouting football’s go-to garbage about players being role models. In fact, the fans on both sides loved it when the players engaged with them. It made them part of the theatre. It included them. It brought them closer.

In our anger and our vindictiveness and our thirst for downfall, we have lost that dynamic in the Premier League. We have lost our sense of humour.

We are told so often and so earnestly about the importance of the game we are watching that, for the 90 minutes we watch, we have lost our ability to laugh.